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So today I thought I’d compile a list of songs that I’ve been enjoying a lot recently. I’d recommend them all to any music lover! Here we go!

Come With Me Now- KONGOS

I heard this song on the radio in Montauk a couple of weeks ago, and I was hooked immediately. A few days later, I downloaded it, and I’ve been listening to it on repeat ever since. I honestly don’t think I’ve heard a song as awesome as this on mainstream pop radio in years. Probably not since “Pumped Up Kicks,” which was what? 4 years ago? Anyway, it’s refreshing to hear an actual guitar solo on the radio. I sort of thought those had gone to the grave, along with cassette tapes, B-sides, and other things generally existent before I was born.
Anyway, I can’t wait to hear more from this band, who I believe is currently opening for Kings of Leon. I hope this song becomes a huge hit and gets lots of accolades. It’s just that good.

Dirty Work- Steely Dan

As if I didn’t love Jim Parsons enough, I saw on a blog I’m subscribed to that he posted a clip of this song on Instagram recently. It didn’t list the title, so I spent a while furiously trying to identify it, and when I finally did, I listened to it nonstop for probably two hours. I don’t normally listen to Steely Dan, but I absolutely love this song. The vocals and harmonies are beautiful, and there’s an awesome sax solo! Thank you Jim Parsons for indirectly introducing me to one of my new favorite old songs!

Do it Again- The Kinks

I’m currently listening to this on repeat, so I thought it would be appropriate to post here. 🙂
The Kinks have a lot of songs I listen to on repeat, and this is just one of them. I love the lyrics here, which depict monotony and dullness, but the song is anything but boring. It’s one of those songs I can just listen to over and over on any given afternoon and never tire of. With each day that goes by, I more and more can’t believe how underrated the Kinks are by the general population.

Don’t Stop Me Now- Queen

This is one of the few popular Queen songs that surprisingly gets no radio airplay on my local classic rock station. That’s a shame, because it really is an awesome song. The piano is very Elton John-esque, which is just one of the things I love about it, and as always, Freddie Mercury proves his generally accepted status as “greatest rock vocalist of all time” with this song.

Anyway, that’s all for today. If you were unaware of any of these songs before reading this post, I highly suggest you check them out.
More Beatles coming your way soon! In the meantime, have a great week!

For today, I thought I’d do a relatively quick post highlighting some important things going on across the Beatleverse. First, I just saw this article today, and it got me very excited! A new feature-length documentary about the Beatles! There can never be too many of those! Hopefully this one, unlike The Beatles: The Lost Concert, will actually make it to theaters without being pulled due to copyright issues…http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ron-howard-directing-new-beatles-doc-focusing-on-bands-early-years-20140716
As much as I already know about the Beatles’ existence, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of seeing the same magical story told over and over again. It’s almost like seeing a favorite musical continually revived year after year.

I also watched a fantastic program about the Beatles on CNN last week entitled, “The Sixties: The British Invasion”. It was the sixth part in a ten-part series about the most important and revolutionary events of the sixties. As you might have guessed, this episode focused on the arrival of the Beatles in America and the impact of the entire British invasion on American life. I will admit that I saw a VERY similar program on PBS a while back, but that didn’t make this one any less interesting. I always enjoy hearing about how groundbreaking, innovative, and fab the Beatles and their 60s counterparts were back in the day. 🙂

In other news, Paul has begun touring again after a health scare in May. Thank goodness he is better, and judging from a video of a recent concert, he appears to be in his usual top form. I know this may sound greedy considering that I’ve already seen Paul in concert once, but I would give just about anything to see him again. Those fireworks during Live and Let Die were even better than advertised!

There are no particularly Beatley events coming up in the very near future for me, but if anything comes up, I will definitely blog about it. I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful summer/winter, depending on what side of the world you’re on. 🙂

As many of you may know, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in America. It also marks 50 years since the release of their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. To commemorate this, about 500 theaters across the US are re-releasing A Hard Day’s Night this July! Although I own the movie on DVD, I still sort of want to experience it in a actual theater. If only the movies would charge 1964 prices for this special event… 🙂

After reading an article about this in the newspaper today, which included an original review of the movie from 1964 (the reviewer back then apparently did not know George’s name…), I was inspired to break out my DVD and watch this movie, yet again. I’ve probably seen it about six times in its entirety by now, and I found myself reciting a lot of the lines under my breath, in attempted Scouse accents. I love how fast paced this movie is, which shows how crazy and hectic the Beatles’ actual life was back then. In fact, this movie plays more like a documentary than a traditional movie.

Just as a side note, a couple of famous teenage extras in this movie include Phil Collins and Meryl Streep. How awesome it would have been to be an extra in this film! That would surely be a story to tell the grandkids. Also, considering that this movie was made to capitalize on the Beatles’ fame at the height of Beatlemania, I don’t think the screaming girls throughout the movie were really acting… 🙂

Anyway, with this movie in mind, I’ve created a poll devoted to the Beatle movies. Personally, I would probably vote for both Help! and A Hard Day’s Night as my favorites, but I’d love to see how others vote. Enjoy!

Okay, I think this segment is becoming a bit of a joke, but since I keep coming up with new Beatlemaniacism symptoms, I figure I should do my civic duty and continue posting them. Here we go, yet again! If you have any symptoms of your own that you’d like to share (don’t be embarrassed… There is no shame in being a Beatlemaniac), feel free to comment!

– You freak out when the category on final Jeopardy is “The Beatles,” inform your family that you have waited your entire life for this, and promptly get the question right as soon as it displays on the screen. Oh yeah.
– When you click on a Beatles video on Youtube, you automatically click “like” before you even watch it.
– You constantly try to figure out the Beatley configurations of various four-person ensembles. I sort of stole this from a blog post I read, but among the Big Bang Theory cast members, I’ve decided that Sheldon is John, Leonard is Paul, Raj is George, and Howard is Ringo. See what I mean?
– You compare every concert you go to with the Paul McCartney concert you were fortunate enough to attend. But none of them, not even Elton John, can top the mighty Macca.
– You’ve joined multiple Beatle-related groups on Facebook.
– You know the exact spot in Let it Be where Paul hits a wrong note on the piano. I’m surprised they left it on the album, but it was the Let it Be album. The Beatles didn’t even care enough to oversee the production… Enter Phil Spector, and the rest is infamously history.
– You always write about the Beatles in your SAT essays because they apply to so many different themes of life. Creativity? Check. Hard work? Check. Determination? Check. They’re basically the “To Kill a Mockingbird” of the music industry.
– You sometimes start subconsciously singing Beatles songs while walking down the street without even realizing it.
– Your respect for a musician or a famous person automatically skyrockets if you find out that they like the Beatles.
– You shrieked with delight when Paul won yet ANOTHER Grammy, which seemingly happens every year these days. He’s still a force to be reckoned with!
– If you’re about to leave the room and a Beatles song comes on the radio, you make up an excuse in your head about why you can’t leave the room just yet and stall for the length of the song.
– Whenever you’re running down the street, you feel like a Beatle in opening scene of A Hard Day’s Night when they’re running away from screaming fans.
– Whenever you watch that scene from Ferris Bueller with Twist and Shout, you sing along.
– Many of your friends mention the Beatles when they write messages in your yearbook.
– You frequently listen to the Anthology 2 version of And Your Bird Can Sing just for a good laugh. Hear it here:

I can never listen to this without cracking up at least once. 🙂
– You’ve decided that if you ever got a Twitter, the first person you’d follow would be Paul McCartney/The interns at paulmccartney.com. Let’s face it, he’s definitely not writing his own tweets, but it’s still worth a follow.

Yes, I know it’s Paul’s birthday, but I started this a couple of days ago and wanted to finish it. A birthday post will be on the way very soon!

Wow. I can’t believe I’ve actually been running this blog for a whole year now. This year absolutely flew by, and I can’t believe I have been fortunate enough to see both Paul McCartney and Elton John live in the last 6 months. I definitely did not see that coming last January! I hope that this blog has brought some people entertainment and smiles, because that’s what the Beatles bring to me! 🙂

What I think is so wonderful about having a blog related to something you love is that it gives you the opportunity to express that love to the world however you want, whenever you want. It’s a wonderful thing to have this pastime, and I truly have enjoyed every second I’ve spent blogging. If anyone is hesitating about starting a blog, I would highly recommend that they go ahead and do it. I’ve found that blogging is very therapeutic and relaxing for me, and I’m sure the same goes for others as well. As I said when I started this, I wasn’t sure whether I’d have enough to write about the Beatles to carry a whole blog, but clearly that hasn’t been a problem because I’m still going. And my obsession with Elton John has helped that out a bit as well… Thanks Elton for providing additional blogging material. Not that you’re actually reading this. 🙂

If this is at all possible, I love the Beatles an infinite amount of times more now than I did even a year ago, and I was a pretty big fan back then already. While writing about them, I’ve found that my love for them is so much deeper than just enjoying their music and fawning over their good looks from 50 years ago. There’s something deeper with the Beatles and their music that makes them so timeless, and I think it’s that they showed a genuine understanding of what music is all about: putting abstract thoughts and feelings into songs that people will listen to again and again.

Perhaps this is why after the umpteenth time listening to Revolver or Rubber Soul, I always find something new to think about, because I interpret each song differently every time. There’s so much depth to the Beatles in the character and personality of each band member that gets translated into their music, and I greatly admire their work ethic and drive to push themselves musically. They are a perfect example of how people should always look to improve themselves and their work, no matter how great they think they are.

I also think that there is a certain pure beauty in the Beatles’ music that I find applies to most of the artists I like. Not everything is perfectly executed in every song, but there is always an intent behind each one to create something beautiful and an understanding of how to do so, and I respect that their music is not just slickly produced noise, it’s genuine, honest art.

I feel like I’ve rambled a lot, so now I’d like to share a cover the Beatles did on Live at the BBC that I’m currently listening to while I type this. It’s so beautiful, and they didn’t even write it, but they perform it so amazingly that I just have to share it here. I just love how John, Paul, and George’s voices sound together on this one, with John singing so tenderly on lead vocal and George and Paul providing some gorgeous backing harmonies. There’s so much heart and soul put into this that always makes me emotional, and if you listen to it, I think you’ll understand why.

I’ve tried to vary the content and format of my blog posts by switching things up and not always starting each post with a pretty picture of George Harrison, though I always want to, but if you have any suggestions on something I could do better, I’d appreciate any feedback. I think I might start doing a “Beatles Song of the Week” or something like that, but other than that I don’t have too many ideas. I will definitely continue blogging as regularly as I can this year, and I greatly appreciate each and every one of the over 7,000 views I’ve received. Is that a lot? Not really. But does that discourage me from trying to reach more people? NO! 🙂

I’ve very excited for this upcoming month, because there will be a couple of televised tributes to the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in America about which I will surely be blogging. I hope that everyone who reads this blog has grown to love the Beatles, or just life in general, a little more because of it.
Have a great first full week in 2014!

So this post isn’t really Beatle-related, but today I thought that I’d compile a list of songs that, for whatever reason, I have been listening to a lot in the last few weeks. No real significance to these songs, but perhaps if I post them here, they won’t be stuck in my head anymore! Somehow, I don’t think it works that way. 🙂

Blue Oyster Cult- Don’t Fear The Reaper

I hear this song on the radio all the time, but it wasn’t till a few weeks ago that I decided to actually get it out of the library so I could listen to it whenever I wanted. I don’t quite know why I like this song so much; I think it’s a combination of the cool riff and the haunting vocals that gets me. Either way, I can’t stop listening to it!

Led Zeppelin- Hey, Hey, What Can I Do

This is another song that I heard on the radio and liked so much that I decided to download it. I’m not a huge fan of Led Zeppelin, but I do like a lot of their songs, and if I had to choose my favorite song of theirs, this would definitely be it. I just love the guitar part here, and I never get tired of listening to this song!

Gavin DeGraw- I Don’t Want To Be

How handy that the day I decided I wanted to download this song, I saw that someone in my family had just downloaded it! No real reason why I love this song. I just do. It’s pretty awesome.

Neil Young- Old Man (Live At Massey Hall 1971)

The studio version of this song is beautiful, but for a while, the only version that I had on my iPod was this one, and I am absolutely in love with it. If I ever learn how to play guitar, this song will be very high on the list of “songs to learn”. It’s just so powerful and brilliant.

The Kinks- Full Moon

For reasons I don’t quite understand, I am absolutely OBSESSED with this song!!!! Something about the beginning piano bit just hypnotizes me, and whenever this comes up on my iPod, I have to listen to it at least three times in a row. I’ve been listening to this A LOT recently, and I probably will continue to do so in the upcoming weeks. This song is just beautiful and perfect.

Well, I think that’s all for now. I’m sure there are a lot more songs that I could add to this list, but these were the first few that came to mind.
Have a wonderful week! Happy first day of December!

This is what I wrote on the wall outside Abbey Road Studios. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Yes, I have brought this back! It’s taken a while, but I have come up with a plethora of Beatlemaniacism symptoms to share with you! Some of these I honestly can’t believe apply to me, but they all do. So, without further ado…

You know you’re a Beatlemaniac if:

– You thought, for quite a while, that the Hofner violin bass played famously by Paul McCartney was the only type of bass guitar in existence.
– You and your friends are STILL quoting the SNL sketch from last December that featured Paul and Martin Short.
– If you’re out somewhere where there’s a DJ and you have the opportunity to request a Beatles song, you always take that opportunity.
– You occasionally tear up out of the blue at the thought of George not being in this world any longer. All things must pass, but George will live forever in your heart!
– Hearing the news that the royal baby’s name was George made you VERY happy!
– You lie in bed at night listening to the Beatle Christmas messages just to silently fangirl over their adorable voices and hilarious antics even though it’s nowhere near Christmas. It’s never too early to start celebrating!
– When you’re listening to their music, you get so into it and lost in Beatleland that you sometimes actually forget where you are.
– You pay extra attention to a conversation if you hear that someone’s name is John, Paul, or George. But let’s face it, NO ONE is named Ringo besides Ringo himself!
– You listen to Beatles music for nearly the entire duration of long plane rides or car trips to keep yourself entertained.
– You are a Beatles completest who must own every version of every song they ever recorded, ever.
– Your name on Doodle Jump and other assorted apps is something along the lines of, “#1 George fan”.
– Even though you’re a girl, you wish that you could sing like the Beatles. If I had Paul McCartney’s golden voice, I would thank my lucky stars every single day.
– Your ultimate, probably-never-going-to-happen dream job is to start an all-girls Beatle tribute band. But it might help if you learned how to play guitar first…
– You’ve memorized every note of every Beatles guitar solo and insist on singing along to all of them.
– You freak out when the Beatles are randomly mentioned in museum exhibits. Yes, it does happen. I was with my family at Kensington Palace this summer and they had an special exhibit devoted to the fashion of the royal ladies of the past 50 years. There was a video showing Princess Margaret wearing some pretty frock and meeting the Beatles that was being shown on repeat, and it took me about 10 minutes to leave that room.
– You also freak out when there’s an SAT practice question about the Beatles and how the large majority of people consider them to be the greatest band of all time. Wow. If this happened on the actual SATs, I would probably be very distracted and disoriented, so maybe it’s better that most SAT questions are not Beatle-related.
– You have emotional (well, emotional on your side) conversations with your teachers when they comment on something Beatle-related you’re wearing or that you’ve written.
– You say, “Good day Sunshine!” every time you see your neighborhood cat, whose name just so happens to be Sunshine!
– You’ve considered simplifying things at Christmas by asking for Paul McCartney. Just Paul McCartney under the tree, maybe with a festive bow. That’s all you really want.
– You love finding pictures of the Beatles doing random, normal human things like washing their hands, playing with their kids, eating (preferably fish and chips), or driving. It makes them seem less like gods and more like actual people to you.
– You will insist to your future spouse that one of your kids is named at least partially after a Beatle, whether with a first or middle name. I love the name Gavin, for some reason, so how about Gavin Paul for a young lad? George Eric? John Elton?
Okay, maybe not John Elton, because when little John has to write his last name first and his first name last, it will read “Elton, John.” And you would never put that kind of artistic pressure on a young kid. It wouldn’t be fair.
🙂

That’s all for now. Enjoy the rest of the weekend! I will try to review Elton John’s new album, “The Diving Board,” tomorrow! Have a wonderful rest of the weekend!